1. Field
This field relates to the client/server computing environment, and particularly for optimally processing web pages in a multiple language client/server environment.
2. Description of the Related Art
As more businesses enter the Internet and the World Wide Web (the “web”) environments, customers have multiple businesses in similar areas to look for products and services. These customers are from a variety of countries and speak a multitude of different languages. In addition, as competition increases, the need to create more, consistent, and better content to display to users also increases. A company that does not create more, consistent, and better content lags behind its competitors that do provide such content.
Conventional systems require programmers to program pages of content information to be displayed to users. This content is often written in the Hypertext Markup Language (or “HTML”), or other scripting language designed to provide pages of information to end users that access the company's web site over the Internet. Company web sites often contain large quantities of information. However, companies on the Internet want to provide a certain “look and feel” to each page of their web site to help distinguish their web site from web sites of competitors. Certain areas of the pages of information to be shown to users is sometimes dedicated to common graphics or themes. For example, a company may choose to place its logo on the upper left hand corner of each web page shown to users. Additionally, a company may divide each web page shown to users into various “frames” of information. A frame along the left side of the page may be dedicated to icons for hot-linking to other areas within the web site of possible interest to the user. A frame along the right side may be dedicated to advertisements of the company or its business partners, and a frame across the top of the page may be dedicated to other company related information, press announcements, or the like.
Conventional systems require the programmers preparing web pages to program the page areas in a consistent manner as set forth by company policy. In this manner, when combined on the web site, the collective web pages provide the consistent “look and feel” that help market and distinguish the company from competitors and provide a consistent look with which end users can become familiar and comfortable. However, conventional systems have shortcomings that need to be addressed.
One shortcoming of conventional systems is that it takes considerable time to program the collective pages and ensure the desired consistency. If a programmer fails to follow the guidelines set forth by the company, the consistency of the collective web pages is diminished. Internet commerce is increasingly competitive and high paced. The amount of time needed to program consistent web pages may exceed that of competitors. If a company cannot keep pace with its competitors on the Internet, its competitors will soon capture greater market share and greater profits.
Another shortcoming of conventional systems is that a desired change to the look and feel of a company's web site involves changing numerous web pages involving increased time and effort. Adding new logos or changing the content or location of common frame areas involves changes to multiple web pages. Each time a web page is changed the chances of introducing an error or programming bug are increased. These bugs or errors may cause web pages to be unusable or create user dissatisfaction and reflect poorly on the company's reputation when encountered by users.
Another shortcoming of conventional systems is that such systems are generally not compatible for use by all of the major languages of the world. Adding multi-language support in conventional systems often involves creating additional language-specific web servers to process a particular language request. The creation of language-specific web servers winds up compounding the shortcomings described above. An additional shortcoming of multi-language support in conventional systems is that the databases of information collected from users are often separated for at least two reasons. First, the web servers are separated from one another to provide multi-language support. And second, the character sets used by the many languages are often not compatible with one another. For example, double-byte character sets, such as the Japanese JIS and Shift-JIS character sets require two bytes of data per character while the characters of the English language only require one byte. A field that is 10 bytes long in English will therefore only accommodate 5 Japanese characters. Character sets have been established, such as Unicode®, that provides a common character set for most languages of the world. However, these character sets are rather new and are not readily processed by end user computers running various browser programs to access the company's web site. The character sets used by end users is further complicated by the different character sets provided by different computing platforms used by end users. For example, a personal computer running Windows 95/98/NT as an operating system and Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Explorer as a web browser may utilize a different character set in some countries than an Apple MacIntosh or Unix environment.
Accordingly, it is desirable to have a system that can create a web site with a consistent “look and feel” without the shortcomings described above. This consistency should be provided while making the development and delivery of content more rapid than with conventional systems. It is also desirable to have a system that reduces language barriers by using a universal character set, such as Unicode®, to exchange information in multiple languages with end users. This reduction of language barriers should accommodate users from many platforms without forcing such users to use a particular character set.